What is Your Opinion of Atmos Music?


Most members here have "stereos" for music and "home theater" for movies. Atmos music takes the immersive format that started with movies and uses it for music. It seems Dolby has a series of interviews/tutorials with recording engineers and that is picking up momentum. Personally I listen to immersive music (atmos and surround sound) about 80% of the time and the other 20% I listen to two channel on my desktop system. What is your experience with either Atmos music/spatial audio or using any of the various upmixers (auro-3d, dolby surround, etc) for immersive music listening?

 

kota1

@sdw , that is how Wilhelm from Auro 3D suggests to do it. I positioned my pair of top middle speakers and split the difference so they can double as my VOG speakers for Auro.

Very soon, if not now, the technology will outstrip content.

Technology that can create content will need to be developed.

Bots with creative programs. Regular people can’t keep up.

How much music warrants what we have now?

New revenue streams. Oh boy!!! Can’t wait.

 

 

While I never cared much about home theatre sound, but after seeing Bong Joon-ho’s film Parasite in a good theatre (last film before covid, that’s a while back :-) where surround really added to the house-as-character motif, I became interested. So when my hand-me-down stereo DAC died I replaced it with an 8-channel.

That was with regular surround in mind. Fortuitously, Apple’s macOS TV.app gained support for Atmos (up to 14 channels now) which means I could do 5.1.2 for example (or add another DAC and create an aggregated device via CoreAudio to get more).

I haven’t gone there yet (need amp channels and speakers, obviously). But I can listen to the binaural Atmos mix via headphones (AirPods Max) in the meantime. I’m one of those people who hears headphone soundstage more-or-less in a line transecting my ears so I’ve never been much of a head-fi enthusiast. But the Spatial Audio mix (aka Atmos) usually improves things, moving the main soundstage forward and and expanding it generally (I listen to studio-assembled music for the most part so I’m not pursuing venue sound, so no comment on that).

So far that works from TV.app (where it’s quite uncanny) and Music.app on recent macOS, iPadOS and iPhoneOS devices (and from an Apple TV hardware box too of course). As Apple Music is my usual source that’s pretty helpful. The head tracking is ok but I little off right as I turn from centre. I’ve set up the personal spatial profile by doing the LiDAR ear scan thing, which helped a bit.

Apart from encouraging up-to-date hardware (the source of Apple’s gratuitous billions) there’s no extra charge for hi-res or spatial.

@axo1989 , Atmos will "see" your speaker setup (2,5,7,11, whatever) and do its best to place each sound object in the mix. I have tried atmos with only two speakers and a subwoofer and compared to stereo and in my rig I notice a difference in the soundstage and the bass. You can compare yourself and see how you like.